


It's True the Girl They Speak of Died

by daystarsearcher



Series: Osgood Must Suffer [2]
Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005), Downtime (Reeltime 1995), Sarah Jane Adventures
Genre: Angst, Discussion of past abusive relationships, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, Stockholm Syndrome, Trauma, mention of suicide, some internalized homophobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-26
Updated: 2019-07-26
Packaged: 2020-07-20 00:00:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,828
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19982713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/daystarsearcher/pseuds/daystarsearcher
Summary: Osgood isn't dead. Missy is. Kate's work is only just beginning. (sequel to Nor Yet Favor to Women of Skill)





	It's True the Girl They Speak of Died

**Author's Note:**

> Doctor Who is the property of the BBC; please don't sue me.
> 
> The title comes from the lyrics of the Seanan McGuire song 'The True Story Here,' a wonderful song that contains 100% more werewolves than this story.
> 
> Hope you enjoy!

The creak of a door, and Kate wonders for a moment at the fact that the doors in the Doctor’s TARDIS apparently have hinges, that they don’t do the whoosh-y thing like in Star Trek. Surely Osgood will comment on how they don’t do the whoosh-y thing like in Star Trek.

Osgood looks up at the camera.

“Are you going to kill me now?”

She sounds sad, but resigned. 

“Don’t be an idiot.” The Doctor’s voice is a growl wrapped tight around an open wound. “I’ve already told you I’m not going to kill you; weren’t you listening?”

Osgood looks away again, hugging her knees tighter to her chest. “Is the Mistress coming for me?”

The sound of pacing. “She’s dead. You know that.”

“I know.” Osgood tucks her head down against her legs; she’s hiding her eyes. “Will she be here soon?”

#

_Five hours earlier:_

One minute she is getting the call on her mobile, the next she is in her car, the calm automated voice telling her which way to turn, how much farther. Two bowties on the seat next to her. Most of the belongings in Osgood’s locker had gone to her estranged family, but there were a few items that Kate could claim as U.N.I.T. property: two bowties that she was fairly certain had been ‘borrowed’ from the archives, and a question-mark-handled umbrella that Osgood definitely hadn’t gotten at Marks and Spencers. The umbrella is at the office. The bowties have been sitting in a drawer in Kate’s flat for fourteen months.

Osgood.

Osgood is…

Has been. For fourteen months. But then again—time travel. It could be more. Or less.

Please, please, let it have been less.

Kate’s hands are very tight on the steering wheel. Her fingers have gone very white. Her heart is beating very fast, has been beating very fast for some time now. She has been talking on the phone for some time now, she realizes. Her voice is steady, authoritative, barking out security clearance codes as her hands maneuver the car. Her eyes keep being drawn from the road to the bowties. One red, one black with white spots.

She cannot tell if she is calm or about to start screaming.

#

They make her watch the tapes before she can see Osgood. Actual tapes, not DVDs. Apparently a 1996 camcorder was the first available bit of technology the Doctor had around. These inconsequential details flash and flutter through her mind, a hum like the zigzags of static across the screen, attempting to keep her from hearing all the words that Osgood is saying. Her fingernails bite into the armrests of the chair as she hears all the words that Osgood is saying. You would think that it could not get worse, each sentence after each sentence, but it does, and she cannot stop hearing the words, her ears keep hearing them and her brain keeps understanding them and on and on and on it goes until her hands are white and twisted gripping the edges of her chair to keep her from leaping up, away from the words and towards Osgood, she wants to grab the attendant and demand that they take her to see Osgood, she drove for two hours and she doesn’t need a tape, she needs to see her right now, she needs to get her out, she needs to take her home and take care of her.

Only the knowledge that she would be insisting on these same procedures if it were anyone else but Osgood in the cell, anyone else than herself demanding a visit, keeps her in the chair in front of the screen as the U.N.I.T. employees slot in one tape after another. 

Another zigzag line of static. Osgood sitting in the chair now, not on the floor. Her head still bent. Not showing her eyes.

Osgood is saying the words very calmly. It is like she is giving a report, about someone else being killed over and over again, being beaten, being raped. 

She keeps asking the Doctor when he is going to kill her.

She keeps asking when the Mistress is coming for her. That is the only time she is not perfectly calm. There is fear in her eyes and the hunching of her back, then. And there is hope in the pleading of her voice, in her arms as she crosses them over each other, hugging herself tight.

The hope in her voice makes Kate’s stomach roil.

“She needs me,” Osgood insists to the Doctor. A quick glance up at him, just long enough for the light to reflect off her eyes. “I belong to her. If you’re not going to kill me yet, you need to give me back.” Her hands are shaking, fists clenched at her sides, as if she is trying to hold her body together, keep it from shattering into a thousand pieces. “I’m hers. She’ll hurt people if you don’t give me back.”

“She’s dead!” the Doctor thunders.

Osgood shakes her head, looking at the ground. “That doesn’t _matter.”_

Kate puts the bowties back into her pocket after the third tape, when Osgood says what Missy did to her with them.

#

The holding cell look exactly like the brig in Star Trek: The Next Generation. It should. Osgood designed it. Kate remembers her final report on the project, Osgood stammering but finally confident enough after several months of working with Kate to make a joke—which in Osgood’s case meant making an obscure reference to a fictional character who never designed a prison he wouldn’t have wanted to be incarcerated in. And of course Kate hadn’t gotten the reference, and Osgood had blushed and stammered and nearly had an asthma attack right there, and— _and I thought, who has done this to her, who has made her so afraid, who can have hurt her, how_ —and Kate had said “inhaler” and suggested a book exchange, Terry Pratchett for Agatha Christie, trying to keep her face neutral as she felt protectiveness surge like a sea in her chest, like a fire— _who has hurt you, who could have hurt you—_

She knows who has hurt her this time. And it does not help.

The holding cell looks almost exactly like the brig on Star Trek: The Next Generation, but there is a small bathroom/shower unit like those in the sleeper cabins of trains. The door of the bathroom/shower unit has been taken off. It is U.N.I.T. procedure to take the door off for suicide risks.

Osgood looks so small on the monitor screen, curled in one corner of the cell next to the force-field.

Kate should have protected her.

“Are you ready, ma’am?” the security guard to her right asks. His badge reads ‘Evans.’ Kate reads his badge, immediately forgets it.

“Yes,” she says, wrenching her eyes off the screen.

She follows him through the door.

#

There is one moment, when Kate sees Osgood, before Osgood sees her.

In that moment, Osgood’s hair hangs low over her face, her head tucked to the side. If it weren’t for the plain pale blue scrubs—not Osgood’s, not the Doctor’s, something dug out of a cabinet somewhere when they were processing her; after all, the prisoner uniforms wouldn’t have been appropriate—Kate thinks she might be able to imagine that this is just another assignment. That Osgood has just been doing some routine maintenance and become absorbed in a technical detail, and that all it will take is the sight of her supervisor to bring her back down to earth.

Oh please, let her come back.

She is at the edge of the force-field in two strides, she is opening her mouth, she is halfway between deciding whether to say hello first or immediately order the technicians to take down the barrier—

And then Osgood sees her.

Osgood flinches back with her whole body, eyes wide and white as she scrambles hands and knees away from Kate. “No! No, no, no, not you, they promised me you wouldn’t come!”

Kate’s hands have gone up without her noticing, up in the air in a gesture of surrender, no weapons; one of the soldiers has started forward, hand on his gun, and she jerks her chin sharply at him, back in that corner _now_ , her heartbeat is going a thousand times a minute, god it would take just one trigger-happy soldier boy to undo all the miracle of this moment, so never mind the thousand jagged glass feelings ricocheting through her right now— _who hurt you, who hurt you this way, how could they, I would never_ —there is no time for heartbreak.

“Osgood,” she says slowly, gently. Pitches her voice low. She is a mother, she has woken children from nightmares. “Osgood, it’s me. I’m not going to hurt you.”

Osgood is pressed all the way up against the back wall now, her entire body trembling with the effort of pushing herself as far away from Kate as she possibly can. Her entire body tensed as if with enough willpower she can burst through the padded wall and the concrete beneath. Her head is twisted to the side as though she cannot bear to see; her eyes keep darting forward as if Kate is a serpent about to strike. “It can’t be you, I wasn’t thinking of you so there’s no reason for her to—if it’s you then it’s a trick. But I was good, I only let the Doctor go because she didn’t really want to kill him, I only disobeyed a little, she doesn’t punish me like this—” and she looks up directly at Kate for one shining moment, eyes plaintive, her forehead creased as if she is only trying to optimize some tricky set of equations and protocols—“Was it Clara? I didn’t let her go but I knew the Doctor would rescue her and I didn’t say anything—I didn’t want the Mistress to hurt her but I should have said, I shouldn’t have been jealous, she was counting on me—”

There is no time for heartbreak; there is barely time for the sensation of Kate’s heart being stretched past its breaking point, each muscle fiber and bit of connective tissue straining to hold together, to keep from ripping slowly apart.

“No one is going to kill you,” Kate says, and she does not, must not, let her pain show in her voice. Has to keep her voice soothing, neutral. This is how you gain the trust of wild things, children and animals who have been hit. “No one is ever going to hurt you again. I’ve come to take you home—”

And this is entirely the wrong thing to say.

Osgood is shaking her head now, shaking it faster and faster, is starting to slam it back into the wall.

“Osgood—” Kate begins in alarm.

“No! No, no, no.” Her voice is going smaller and smaller, and somehow that is more horrifying, the way the words seem to want to curl up inside Osgood, burrow deep into her where they cannot be found. She is burrowing into the back of the cell, her shoulder blades hunched up around her ears, every muscle of her body on high alert, a rabbit that will bolt. “I can’t go home, not after—she’d only let me go if it was part of her plan, she’ll want to hurt somebody, hurt—” her eyes flick up to Kate’s, flinch away again, her whole voice quavering as if she is made of glass and about to fall apart. “She must have put something inside of me, nanites or a virus or something, she wouldn’t let me go otherwise, it’ll be part of her plan, it’ll be a punishment, I’ll hurt so many people, she wants me to hurt you—”

“She’s _dead,_ ” Kate says, and there it is, the pain she wasn’t supposed to show, shot through every word. It has escaped her iron control; it is swamping her, swallowing her whole. “She can’t hurt you anymore, Osgood. She can’t hurt anyone.”

But Osgood doesn’t seem to hear the words. She just keeps shaking her head, keeps trying to get further away.

“She wants me to hurt. I’ll hurt you. She’ll make me. She’s already made me. She’ll never let me go.”

#

“We value your input into her character, of course, but we do have to take these threats very seriously.”

Kate has already forgotten this psychologist’s name. There have already been so many psychologists, and all their words have been the same, and how is she supposed to listen to their words and remember their assembly line faces and names when the monitor is right there, and Osgood is right there on the monitor, and Osgood is crying.

Osgood is holding herself a little more loosely, now, finally convinced that Kate is not about to come charging back through the door. Her shoulders have come down from her ears. Her arms are draped, not pulled tight, across her knees.

But she is still crying.

“We’ll do a thorough assessment, and I’m confident that we’ll soon have a plan in place to best guide Dr. Osgood through her recovery.”

Kate feels herself nod. The psychologist continues to talk. Kate is blatantly staring at the monitor; it feels impossible that the psychologist has not noticed. But he blathers on and on, and Kate watches the hunched, lonely figure of her former assistant, and the pale reflection of her own face on the monitor: gaunt cheekbones, haunted eyes, ghostly skin and hair. A ghost. When did she become this ghost of herself, wrapped in old flannel and memories for comfort, one foot out of the world?

 _Self-pity_ , she can almost hear her dad say as if he is in the room, as if he is delivering one of those insufferable lectures he used to give her back when she was a teenager and angry at the world—angrier at him, if she only could have admitted it. _You can’t give in to self-pity, Kate. Not when others are counting on you. Nothing will tear you apart faster._

The psychologist is still talking. “And perhaps eventually we can reintroduce the notion of your coming to visit—”

“Tomorrow,” Kate says.

The psychologist moistens his lips. “I really don’t think that is wise—”

“I won’t see her if she doesn’t want me to. I won’t come near her.” Kate clenches her jaw. She can feel her feet gripping at the bottom of her shoes, as if she can hold onto this patch of earth and hold herself there despite the tidal force of all the world’s bureaucracy arrayed against her. “But I am coming back tomorrow.”

#

It’s late, and Kate takes a room at a local inn, falls into bed and thinks she will fall asleep instantly; finds herself staring at the water stains on the ceiling instead.

Her heart is startled at every beat it takes. Every breath in and out is a revelation, exhausting and yet impossible to ignore, to disregard and close her eyes as if this world she has fallen into is not a miracle.

A bent, broken miracle. But a miracle nonetheless.

Her mouth tastes like bitter coffee and sterile air and too many hours awake. Her heartbeat is a drum in her ears.

And Osgood is alive.

Alive!

Osgood is alive. 

When Osgood died, Kate went sane with grief. If madness is pink elephants and mistaking your wife for a hat, then that must have been sanity, that cold, orderly line of practical thoughts marching through her brain single-file as she stood in the rain at the burying of an empty coffin. She calculated the likely price of the casket. She made a mental note that she would have to dry-clean her coat, and buy a new umbrella. She mentally wrote a first draft of an e-mail to all staff explaining the new file-naming protocol. And that coffin, that empty coffin; she kept coming back to that and how little sense it made, what a futile symbol it was, what a waste of U.N.I.T. funds on something that wouldn’t help in the slightest.

Jac had to say her name three times before she realized the funeral was over.

And all the days and weeks and months after that, she always caught herself before saying Osgood’s name out loud when she needed a file passed to her or when it would have been her turn to go on a biscuit run or when she wanted her opinion—except once, there was one time when she said the name out loud, but the room was empty, and she was at home in her flat.

(There was no reason for Osgood to have been there, even if she were alive. But she had thought of something Osgood would have found funny.)

If that was sanity, is this madness now? Terror and exhilaration lighting up her mind like fairy lights, a single word humming through her blood, circling through her brain in dizzying loops, an earworm she cannot—would not let herself if she could—dislodge: 

_Alive._

Osgood is alive. She will not see her tomorrow. Osgood is alive. She will not see her tomorrow, but she will be there. Osgood is alive. And she will bring things, Osgood will need things beyond the cold utilitarianism of her space utopia cell; the cafeteria food they will be bringing her is atrocious, and the scrubs cannot be keeping her warm enough. Osgood is alive, and she will need things, and she will need to be reminded that she is cared for. She cannot stare at the wall all day the way Kate is staring at the ceiling; she will need her books, her movies—she is over a year behind on all her podcasts. Beth will know about comics; Kate can call her daughter and quiz her in the morning.

Kate begins to plan a series of early morning phone calls.

#

It is a month before Osgood agrees to see Kate.

Kate brings her a sandwich.

Osgood’s reaction to her entrance is not as extreme as it had been the first time. But it is still there, that quick nervous flick of her head, the way she pulls her blanket tighter around her. Kate tries to take comfort in the fact that the blanket is the one she sent her. Osgood didn’t have to use it, didn’t have to have it there when she saw Kate.

“Hello again,” Kate says. Her voice sounds strained to her own ears, creaking mesh unable to quite hold back the flood of worry and affection and reproach. She keeps her arms loose, hanging at her sides. She is sure to stay close to the doorway. She cannot let Osgood think she will hurt her.

Osgood sits up, the blanket still wrapped around her. She tries to smile, but it folds its way back into her face. “Kate.”

Kate’s heart flutters like a trapped butterfly at the sound of her own name. The fear that is still in it, like a poison pumping through the syllable. But not only fear, surely? Can that be all that Osgood has left inside of her?

“I see you got my, ah—” Kate gestures awkwardly at the blanket.

“And the jumpers,” Osgood says. “Thank you, ma’am. They’re very warm.”

“Good,” Kate says, and she means it so wholeheartedly that for a moment she forgets that any other word exists in the English language. She repeats it. “Good. I was worried about you. That you—I was worried it would be too cold in here.”

“I had to promise not to use them to hang myself,” Osgood says. “I told them I wouldn’t. That would be more work for Missy. She was quite upset the last time I killed myself without permission.”

Kate has been steeling herself for a statement like this for an entire month, and it still stops her heart cold.

“And the books?” she says, when she can halfway trust her voice again. “You got them all?”

“And the iPod,” Osgood says. “I’m not allowed electronics, but some of the guards plug it in for me so I can listen.”

“ _Some_ of them?” Kate says, her voice dangerous. Out of the corner of her eye she sees today’s guard shuffle slightly in place, awkward and guilty.

Osgood flinches. “I don’t mind!” she says quickly. “I have lots of other things to do. They shouldn’t have to listen to my silly shows if they don’t want to. I don’t mind.”

Kate has to take a deep breath so the next words out of her mouth don’t end up being something that scares Osgood any more. Osgood has to take priority over her anger. She can press down all her anger until she is out of the room; she can wait until she is out of the room before she lets herself explode at every single person who has knowingly or unknowingly deprived Osgood of anything, who has made Osgood feel that she should be grateful for these tiny scraps of basic human decency.

“You are not a prisoner,” she manages finally. “And it is their _job_ to make you as comfortable as possible.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Osgood says softly, looking down. Looking as if she doesn’t believe a word. 

Looking as if she is waiting to be hit.

Kate’s shoves her hands into her pockets and clenches them into fists there, safe where Osgood cannot see them and think the violence is meant for her, instead of everyone else.

“I brought you a sandwich,” she says, because it’s the only thing she has left to say.

Osgood’s eyes snap up, alarmed, and Kate holds out a placating hand. “We’ll send it through the transmat. I won’t come any closer. The force field won’t come down.”

Osgood gives a hesitant nod, and Kate hands her package to the guard, who opens up a small compartment and sends it through. It materializes on the floor next to the force field, where Osgood regards it hesitantly for a moment, before shooting a look at Kate; she must decide in favor of not offending her former boss, because she picks it up.

Osgood unwraps the sandwich, takes a careful bite. “Bacon. You remembered my favorite.”

“They can’t be feeding you properly,” Kate says. Suddenly embarrassed for no good reason, slightly defensive. Well, it’s true. They can’t.

And Osgood looks at her for the longest she has looked at her so far. Gives her a small, shaky smile. “You’re such a mum, sometimes.”

And Kate vows that she will bring a sandwich each and every time she visits.

#

Over the next few weeks, Osgood relents enough that Kate can come to the center of the room when she visits, but no further. She still doesn’t want the force field to come down. She still doesn’t want anyone in the cell with her, insists on remote controlled devices for the medical testing—testing that comes back negative each time for viruses, for bacteria, for nanites, for implanted trackers or poisons or explosives. She still clings to the edge of her bunk each time it’s suggested, however gently, that someday soon she might be ready to leave.

Kate could make her leave. Some people would object, would cite safety precautions, but Kate could override them and make them let Osgood go.

But Osgood has spent fourteen months having things done to her against her will, and Kate will be damned if she will add one more to the list.

“It has to be a trick,” Osgood repeats for the thousandth time on Kate’s thirty-sixth visit. “The Doctor didn’t kill me, so she can’t be done with me. I’m hers. This is just temporary. She wouldn’t let me go.”

“The Zero Room on the TARDIS purged all the excess tech from your system,” Kate points out, also for the thousandth time.

And Osgood is already shaking her head, rebuttal at the ready. “It couldn’t, though. It’s the only thing keeping me alive. Missy had to put things in, when she—when I—” Osgood’s jaw clamps shut and she looks away. Her hands are clenched tight in her lap and trembling.

There is something she is not saying, but Kate cannot push her. It would be a something worse than a crime to push Osgood when she is like this. It would be an atrocity.

“So, what?” she says instead, as gently as she can. “You stay here for the rest of your life?”

Osgood looks down. “I don’t mind,” she says softly. “It’s nice here.”

“It’s a _prison_ ,” Kate points out.

“Nobody hurts me,” Osgood says. “And I can’t hurt anybody. If I got out and y—somebody got hurt—”

“That’s not going to happen.”

“You don’t know!” Osgood insists. Her hands are shaking even more now, the stress of arguing with an authority figure; Kate tries to see it as a good sign that she can argue, even if it’s in favor of something completely terrible, something she would never believe if she were in her right mind. “You don’t know her, what’s she’s like. It would be a good joke, to have me kill you.”

“She’s dead,” Kate says, her voice rough as if the words cut her throat coming through; she pushes them through anyway because maybe this time Osgood will believe her, maybe this time Osgood will break free.

“She’d only let me go if there was something I was supposed to do for her.” Osgood acts as if she hasn’t even heard Kate, her mouth is set in a stubborn line that simultaneously heartens Kate and breaks her in two. “It has to be a punishment. She has to want me to kill you.”

“Why would she care about killing me specifically?” Kate points out. “I never got the impression I was a particularly memorable thorn in her side.”

Osgood looks at the floor. Swallows hard. 

Kate could read the shame in that face if she were blind. “Osgood?”

“It’s my fault,” the younger woman whispers finally.

Kate’s forehead creases. “I find that hard to believe.”

“She doesn’t care about you because of you,” Osgood says haltingly. Her hands twist in her lap. “She cares about you because of me. Because she thinks…you were the one that—had me. Before her.”

It takes a second for the words to sink in. When they do, her fury is incandescent. “You’re not responsible for that madwoman’s delusions—”

“But I am!” Osgood interrupts—she looks terrified at herself for interrupting, but even more terrified of letting Kate continue to speak; she plows onward, eyes once again firmly fixed on the floor. “I had—a crush.”

The innocence of that word kills Kate.

“She found out.” Osgood is speaking quickly, a strategy of hers that Kate knows all too well by now, getting the words as fast as she can before she can think better of them. “How I felt, about—you—and, and she assumed. And I let her. Because she was nicer to me, then, when she could hate you instead. When she thought you hurt me.”

Osgood’s hands are trembling where they are twisted together in her lap. The trembling continues all the way up to her shoulders, her chest hitching as she struggles to keep further words in, her breath coming short and sharp and ragged.

“Inhaler!” Kate commands.

Osgood clutches at it automatically, brings it to her mouth.

“Osgood.” Kate’s arms ache with how much she wants to enfold Osgood in them, show her with more than words that she doesn’t hold one ounce of blame for her. Her heart aches with more than words could ever hold. “I’m glad.”

That startles her into looking up. Her eyes are wide.

“You survived,” Kate says, and she lets her voice fill up and overflow with the miracle of that, with every scrap of joy and wonder she has in her. “You brilliant, brilliant woman, you _survived_.” There are tears brimming in the corners of her eyes, and she doesn’t blink them away, needs Osgood to see how much she means this. “I’m so glad you let her believe those things. I’m so glad you could use me against her.”

“You’re not angry?” Osgood is looking at her with a slight frown, as if she is some equation that will not quite resolve. “You’re not angry.” Her voice breaks, then, the veneer of scientific reserve cracking again. “Why aren’t you angry? I said—horrible things, I implied—I lied, I painted a target on your back—”

“And you came _home_ ,” Kate says. 

She is at the force-field now. Somehow, she walked to the edge of the force-field, and Osgood did not flinch away or call out for the guard. Kate raises her hand slowly, lets it rest just above the invisible barrier, just above where she would like to let it rest on Osgood’s hand. Static sparks leap and dance between the force field and her fingers. She repeats herself, lets the full weight of it settle between them:

“You came home.”

#

She dreams of the Mistress’ TARDIS. Her brain insists on modeling it after that brief glimpse of the Doctor’s console room through an open door when she was only a child, even though she knows both Time Lords have doubtless gone through a thousand redecorations by then, probably complaining about it every step of the way.

She dreams of the Mistress’ TARDIS, and she doesn’t dream of why she is there, only that she is there with Osgood, Osgood who is boneless and weeping in her arms, Osgood who is letting her hold her, letting her stroke her lovely long dark hair, letting her press kisses to her temples and whisper comforting nonsense words into her ears and her hair and the soft, sweet-smelling skin of her neck and her shoulder and collarbone.

 _You have me_ , she whispers over and over to Osgood, and in the dream it makes perfect sense, is just the right thing to say, is not inappropriate or awkward in the slightest. _You have me, you have me, you will never have to let me go._

It is such a small thing to be ashamed of, and still the guilt weighs like molten iron in her bones when she wakes.

#

“Beth’s latest obsession is something called Miraculous Ladybug? Frankly, I don’t understand half of what she says about it, but if she follows through on her threat to get Gordon into it, I’ll have to buckle down and watch it or every dinner conversation will turn so cryptic it’ll be like trying to read the Rosetta Stone over beef wellington.”

Kate knows she is rambling as she sits in the chair she’s pulled up by the edge of the force-field, but usually Osgood doesn’t seem to mind, even lets a little smile ghost its way onto her lips as she listens to her former boss fondly sigh and gripe about her children, Gordon with his quiet stolid insistence on doing everything his way regardless of the consequences, Beth with her cheerful near-manic delight in the latest shiny new TV show or boy-toy or bit of tech.

But Osgood is distracted today, nodding along a beat too late at Kate’s stories, and when Kate finally lets herself fall silent, the younger woman’s fingers fret along a loose thread at the edge of her jumper for only a few seconds before the words burst forth, soft but insistent:

“Why are you here?”

Kate starts to stand, something tearing inside her throat but she keeps it out of her voice. “Would you like me to go?”

“No!” And the way her head whips up at that, the sincerity in her voice, tethers Kate to her chair. “I just—” Osgood bites her lip. “I don’t understand. I want to understand.”

And that is Osgood to a tee, ever the scientist, ever hunting down every last loose end until she can tuck it away neat and tidy. It makes Kate’s heart ache in her chest, but almost pleasantly, almost without pain, this glimpse of the woman she keeps wondering if she has entirely lost.

“What can I help you understand?” Kate asks gently. 

“You’re here.” Osgood states this as though it is the incontrovertible yet baffling premise of a geometrical proof. “U.N.I.T.’s a busy place, but you’re here, always. Eight o’clock on the dot, and you call if you think you’re going to be late, but you haven’t been late yet.”

Guilt twinges. “I would come more often if I could, I promise.”

“That’s not what I—” Osgood huffs in frustration, but it doesn’t seem to be directed at Kate. “You don’t have to come at all! No one’s making you—” her eyes widen in alarm—“they aren’t, are they?”

“Of course not,” Kate is quick to reassure. She lets her hand drift up to rest just above the force-field, that light prickling along her skin like the claws of a tentative cat. She invests her voice with all the steadiness and trustworthiness she can. “I’m here entirely of my own free will.”

Osgood stares at her with those big round eyes—lighter than they used to be, veins of silver shot through the dark. The defunct tech in there is still breaking down, being recycled by the processes jump-started by the TARDIS’ Zero Room; one day the silver may be completely gone. Kate has to believe that one day the silver will be completely gone. That one day Osgood will be able to look at herself without the first thing she sees being all the violence that has been done to her.

“But you _know_ ,” Osgood insists, and the shame in her voice—and there is nothing for Osgood to be ashamed of, there is nothing wrong that she has done, how can Kate ever make her believe this basic and obvious truth—cuts so deep that it takes long seconds for Kate to realize what Osgood is so torn up about her knowing. “I told you last week. What I—felt. But you’re still here. And you’re—you’re not mad?”

That questioning lilt at the end of her sentence; she still can’t quite believe it.

Kate sighs. It feels like a great wind settling over a mountain; she feels as old as a mountain, years like solid bedrock in her lungs. It makes her bone-weary, how young Osgood is sometimes. “I know we’re both terminally British, Osgood, but it’s not actually a crime to have feelings.”

“But those kinds of feelings—” Self-loathing curls around the words, strangles them tight and cuts them short. Osgood’s arms seem to cross over her chest of their own volition, pulling tight into a kind of shield.

And God, the way Osgood blames herself, it kills Kate. Wasn’t this all supposed to have changed by now? Wasn’t the younger generation supposed be more confident, less closeted? Wasn’t that what all the legislation and marching in parades had been for, back when she was young and idealistic and the world seemed ready to snap to her attention if she only shouted at injustice loud enough? 

“Believe it or not, Osgood, the idea that you might be interested in women does not come as a complete shock to me,” she says dryly, trying to cover up that well of emotion.

Osgood looks as surprised as if Kate had pulled a rabbit out of her hat. “How…?”

Kate raises an eyebrow. “Well, while obviously not every woman with an abiding interest in waistcoats, bowties, and Captain Janeway is a lesbian, it didn’t exactly stack the deck in favor of your heterosexuality either.”

Osgood looks down at the floor. Scuffs her foot. 

“Bi,” she says softly.

 _Welcome to the club,_ Kate manages to restrain herself from saying. She doesn’t need to make it about her. This is about Osgood, about making sure she knows she is safe. 

And if Kate said that now, then Osgood, who Osgood has become, who Osgood has been made and broke and molded into—this Osgood would think it was a come-on.

“Also a completely valid option,” she says instead.

“I need to ask you something else.” Osgood is staring at the floor still, more intently now, her shoulders hunched, her hands tight on her arms. “I already know the answer, but I need to ask you anyway.”

Whatever it is, it clearly has her terrified. “All right.”

Osgood takes a deep, shuddering breath. “Am I yours now?”

The words come out small, hesitant, shrunk down.

They cut through Kate as if they had come out shrapnel.

A fundamental truth blazes instantly bright in Kate’s mind: her answer must be quick, and firm, and without any tenderness whatsoever, or there will be no rescuing Osgood from that hazy place of doubt and mistrust and self-hatred, submission and pain and self-erasure. _“No.”_

“I knew that.” The words rush out of Osgood’s mouth; she is looking at Kate again, earnest. “I had to—I had to ask. Or I wouldn’t have known, even if I knew. I had to check. You know how I always—have to check.” She grimaces, her hands fretting at her jumper as she tries to find the words, her expression pleading. The next phrases come haltingly, like touchstones she is finding in the dark. “She would say things, and they would be true things, or halfway true things, or only a little bit true, and I would try to keep them straight but I got all mixed up.” Her voice wobbles a bit. “I’m still—mixed up. I don’t remember all the rules. Or I remember them but I think I must have got them wrong, or—”

“There are no rules,” Kate says. “Not like that, Osgood—”

“There have to be!” And Osgood’s voice has gone high-pitched, strangled and panicked. “There have to be rules or I won’t know when I break them, I’ll do something wrong and get hurt, I’ll hurt someone I will I will it’ll be my fault—”

“Never your fault,” Kate says fiercely. She has stood without quite realizing it. She can taste blood in her mouth, she can feel her pulse pounding in her jaw. “Someone hurting you would never be your fault, damn it.”

Osgood is shaking her head, eyes cast down once more—goddamnit, if she would just look at Kate, _look at me, look me in the eye, I am on fire and in this moment I believe could burn away every wound with my glare—_

Osgood’s words are halting. “It was always my fault. When she touched me, it was always— _she said_ —” and Kate can see the cost of those last two words, the effort it takes Osgood to force that little gear into the whirring ticking clock of her mind and make it stick– “she said it was always my fault. I stood too close. I wore the shirt she liked.” She raises her eyes to Kate’s, and she looks so confused, so lost, as if she has turned down a street she has known all her life only to step into an entirely different country. She wrings her hands, a penitent seeking absolution. “I did know.” She swallows, wincing like it hurts. “I did know she liked that shirt.”

“That doesn’t matter,” Kate protests. “Dammit, any reasonable person—you were trying to survive, Osgood, and that didn’t give her any damn right—”

“Why didn’t you say anything?” Osgood interrupts, and the hurt in her voice is so raw, so different from the dispassion with which she usually enumerates Missy’s crimes, that Kate knows instantly what she is talking about, even though she is jumping backwards to a subject Kate thought they had already dealt with. “If you knew what I was, why didn’t you—”

“It wasn’t relevant,” Kate says gently. And it’s true, it wasn’t, it never impacted a thing about Osgood’s job or her abilities, and Kate thought the kindest thing to do was to treat it like nothing at all. 

But she thinks now that that might have been cowardice. That she might just not have wanted to rock the boat. That there might have been something she could have said, to let Osgood know that it was all right, that she was on her side.

Could she have made any of this past year easier for Osgood, instilled a little more confidence and self-worth, if she had just—

“It wasn’t relevant,” she repeats.

“Did you ever…?” Osgood voice falters. “Was I—did I—were you, with me, to me, were you—”

“No.”

And she cannot keep the tenderness from her voice this time. It is the only way she knows how to say all the things that are too hard to put into words, to explain the entirety of what she did not and does not and will not feel. When a person is under your command, they become—‘alien’ is the wrong word, because there have been aliens that Kate has found attractive; Kate has, in point of fact, shagged an alien or two or three or six. But no one under her command, human or otherwise, because when someone is in your power like that they become an entirely different order of life, they become a rock or a tree or a sharp gust of wind or words on a page. And you love them and you would die for them, but attraction? Impossible. A violation of the laws of physics, a line on a piece of paper trying to reach up into three dimensions and touch the shapes there. They are not people you can want to touch. They are images projected onto a screen from another dimension, and you can smile and laugh and argue with them, you can learn every line of their face and every fact of their history, they can become your protégé, your firm right hand, your best friend—but there is a barrier between you, no less insurmountable for its invisibility, and nothing like lust can pass through.

“But you…don’t mind?” Still so timid, still needing so much reassurance, God, it breaks Kate’s heart the way Osgood thinks she might not give her approval for something that doesn’t need her approval in the first place, that should be among the most mundane and unremarkable facts of her life, as banal as her taste in breakfast cereal and the way she braids her hair. “That I’m that way?”

“No,” Kate says, for what feels like the thousandth time. She will say it as many times as it takes to make Osgood believe her. 

“Why?” Osgood begs, the definition of plaintive.

“Because I’m slightly more than the bare minimum of a decent human being,” Kate snaps, and regrets it the next instant as Osgood flinches. This is the truth, but it is not the complete truth. And the complete truth is what she owes Osgood. So she sucks in a deep breath, and lets honesty flow out despite her apprehensions, despite the guard listening in and the video record and the complete lack of privacy: “And I’d be a pretty big hypocrite to mind it in you, seeing as I haven’t objected to it in myself for at least thirty years.”

Osgood gets a look on her face like she is trying to imagine the square root of a negative number. “You’ve…”

“Dated women? Yes.” It’s Kate’s turn to cross her arms. She leans back, trying to give Osgood space without being too obvious about it. “Not for awhile, but then, I haven’t dated anyone for awhile. Married to the job, you know how it is.”

Osgood gives a little nod, tentatively accepting this information. Was this the right thing to do? Will this make Osgood feel safe, or will it contribute to her lingering belief that she has to pay her way with her body? Kate hates feeling this off-balance and unsure, especially about someone she used to know like a well-worn paperback. A treacherous thought slips into her mind: she wants _her_ Osgood back, not this pale, wavering shadow.

And then Osgood’s lip trembles, and Kate knows she would not trade the certainty of this Osgood for a half-chance of a thousand others. 

“Who…” Osgood begins. Her eyes flick to the guard, back to Kate. “Can I ask…”

“My mum kicked me out of the house when I was sixteen because she found me in bed with a girl,” Kate says, falling into her lecturer voice before she realizes it. It is easier that way, to recite the petty dramas of her private life as if they were no more lurid than the orbital anomalies of a far-away star. “I preceded to fall into bed with multiple people of a variety of genders until I ended up with Gordy’s father, which you know didn’t last. There were a couple of one-night stands—” she remembers with sudden clarity the curve of Sarah Jane’s shoulder in the moonlight—“until I made another try at a long-term relationship with Beth’s father, which we all know ended as well as could be expected from my previous track record. And since then I’ve really been involved too much with U.N.I.T. to do more than flirt with the barista across the street. I don’t altogether miss it. It was exciting, but as you get older you start to value things other than excitement.”

Osgood has been listening with the intensity of a top student before an exam. “You make it sound…” she shrugs. “Not nice?”

“I’m not complaining,” Kate says. She sits back down in the chair, willing her posture to relax, willing that relaxation to pass through force field to Osgood. “It’s not as if I haven’t had a great many friendships. And there were nice moments as well. There are pleasant memories I can return to, and time dulls the sharp edges until it’s a bit like remembering your favorite episode of a show. I wouldn’t trade those memories away, even with the pain. It would be trading a part of myself.”

“You never think…” Osgood’s voice is wistful. “You never think you might be happier, if you had a different self?”

“Everyone thinks that now and again.” Kate deliberates a moment, and then clears her throat. “Look, there was a time—” she remembers Sarah Jane’s hair, just starting to tend towards auburn instead of dark brown, the way it brushed the skin of her neck when Sarah Jane dipped low to kiss at the hollow of her throat—“it was just after I first got roped into the whole saving-the-world business, me and Gordy and Dad. I was living on a houseboat, and I’d just reunited with Dad, and Gordy’d been used as a pawn in some metaphysical scheme for world domination, and the last thing I should have been thinking about—” had been the way Sarah Jane’s eyes sparkled, had been her perfume, been the warmth of her hand on Kate’s in the cozy back table in the pub, the elegance of her fingers and the heat of her thigh where it was pressed against Kate’s, and it hadn’t just been the cramped space of the booth—“was getting involved with somebody, however briefly. But—” But Dad had cleared out early with Gordy, a knowing look in his eye as he insisted he could see his grandson safely off to sleep, and Kate could collect if the next day, that she and Sarah Jane could ‘compare war stories’ a bit longer—“I don’t regret it. I don’t regret a minute of it. Even if it didn’t last. Even if it never really started. Even if it made certain things harder, later. It made other things easier, too. It helped make me who I am, and—” she feels that little smirk stretch her lips—“I have it on reliable authority that I’m a bit of a badass.”

And that finally, finally, finally gets Osgood to smile back at her.

The younger woman’s hands are still twisting together, though not as frenetically as before. “Was it—that time—what was it…like?”

Kate hears the question underneath it. “It was very nice.” The memory of Sarah Jane’s lips against hers, so shockingly warm in contrast to the chill night air, so shockingly soft in contrast to her memories of Gordon’s father—the rasp of the fabric of Sarah Jane’s sharp, professional suit against Kate’s charity bin shirt—the shock and the delight and then finally the realization that this had been inevitable, that this had always been going to happen from the moment her father had stood up and ceded the table to them three hours ago in the pub and Sarah Jane had smiled like she had won some secret competition—“ I think she must have asked me about a dozen times if I was sure, and if I’d had any experience with women before—we were both a bit tipsy. Not really my best performance. We slept in till noon, and then had another go at it, bit more skillful that time. Then she tried to make me pancakes and nearly set her kitchen on fire.”

“But you didn’t see her again?” Osgood asks softly.

Kate shrugs. It’s true what she told Osgood: the pain fades, becomes only the memory of an ache, a scratched and faded videotape of loss. “She wanted to meet up again. But her schedule was—she was a successful reporter. I was a single mum. She got called away to another country for a story, and she stayed for weeks and weeks, and we said we’d keep in touch, but—” She shrugs again, unable to find the words. “I met Beth’s dad. He was going back to uni at the same time that I was applying for the first time, and he was determined to prove himself because he felt like he had so much to prove, and I had so much to prove too, and he seemed much more like someone I deserved.” That sounds too self-pitying the instant it leaves her mouth, so she adds: “And he had beautiful eyes. I’ve always had difficulty saying no to beautiful eyes.”

There is silence for awhile after Kate finishes talking. Kate lets Osgood have the silence. Osgood is nodding slowly to herself, that absorbed look in her eyes as they track from left to right in the pattern that Kate recognizes as Osgood taking in a great deal of information, and trying to organize it in a proper pattern. It heartens her, that there are still things she can recognize in Osgood. It heartens her that there are more and more of them with each visit. It makes her—not believe, she cannot quite reach belief no matter how much she wants, but she hopes and she yearns with a force that stretches towards it—that one day Osgood may emerge from the shadowy clouds and chains around her, may claw her way out and forward, nearly intact.

“Thank you,” the younger woman says after several minutes. She lifts her eyes to Kate’s again. There is something new in them, isn’t there? Or is there only less of the silver? “You could—” she swallows hard. “You could put down the force-field. For a little bit.”

It takes a second to comprehend the words, and even then Kate can’t quite believe what she’s hearing. “You’re…you’re certain?”

Osgood nods. “Just for a minute. And—and you’ll—you’ll stay there?”

Kate swallows around the knot in her throat. “Of course. If that’s what you want.”

The guard steps forward, lowers the field. Neither Kate nor Osgood move. No one dies and the world does not end. Kate and Osgood do not move, but the space between them recedes until there are only their eyes, and the tears gathered in each that do not fall.

The minute passes and the force field goes back up and everyone is still alive. For now.

#

Kate is braced for Osgood to panic and backslide, and so she tries not to let her blood pressure skyrocket when Osgood declines her request to visit the next day, and the next, and the next. They have made progress, but progress upsets the delicate equilibrium that Osgood fights so hard to maintain. The important thing is that Osgood knows she is willing to wait, that she will be there when Osgood feels safe around her again.

She tries very hard not to think the phrase _‘if_ Osgood feels safe around her again.’

Four more days pass in endless agonizing clarity, as if time has slowed to a crawl for the express purpose of making her feel to the fullest every drop of acid rain drizzle, every bite of tasteless sandwich, every inane commercial on television long after she should have gone to sleep—every second that is not Osgood getting better.

When Osgood finally lets her back in, she’s not prepared for the force-field to be down again.

“Just for a minute,” Osgood says when her mouth falls open. “I’ve been—I’m trying—I can still just do a minute.” Her back is pressed up against the back of the cell and her arms are wrapped around her sides, her eyes pleading as she looks up at Kate through her fringe. “I still don’t—if I hurt someone—”

“A minute is fine,” Kate says. “A minute is more than fine.”

#

The force-field stays down for longer and longer; Kate is careful never to object when Osgood insists on putting it back up, no matter the evidence piling in favor of their being nothing harmful in Osgood’s system. She has to respect Osgood’s choices. It’s the only thing she can give.

But God, Osgood is so jittery sometimes, so skittish. The literal barrier between them has been removed, and Kate’s confession has taken some of the figurative distance from between them, but there are still things Osgood isn’t saying, won’t say. Kate can see it in the slide of her eyes away from her when she broaches certain topics, in the fret of her fingers or the nervous shudder of her legs.

 _We worked together for years_ , she longs to say sometimes. _Do you honestly think I don’t know when you’re hiding?_

“What’s wrong?” she finally asks. “Is this too much? Am I pushing you too hard, am I making you push yourself too hard, am I—” She has to stop, then, because this is more than she intended to say, because she is not this person who says things like this, who holds herself open to others, even if the other is Osgood, who she would trust with her life.

“It’s not—too much,” Osgood murmurs, the set of her shoulders suggesting that she is huddling from the cold. “It’s—the opposite.”

She shoots Kate a beseeching glance, and Kate sees, suddenly, the way she is holding herself.

The way she is literally holding herself, her arms tight around herself, because she doesn’t know how to ask for contact, has forgotten how contact works when it is not forced.

“You can ask for things,” she says finally, when she can speak again past the memory of that videotape, Osgood listing all the things Missy had forced on her. “You can ask for whatever you want.”

Osgood twitches, something rebellious in the flex of her hands into fists. She doesn’t believe Kate. “You don’t mean that.”

“I don’t mean that I’m going to give you whatever you want,” Kate says calmly. “But you can ask. And you won’t be punished. You know that.”

“Do I?” Osgood challenges, her eyes dark.

“You do,” Kate says firmly. “But you can check, if you like. Run an experiment.”

Osgood screws her eyes shut for a second. “I want—” A shudder runs through her, a convulsion like a half-sob. “I want to know what I am. To you. I want it to be just one thing and one simple thing where I know the rules and I just have to do what you say. I want to get down on my knees for you and—”

“No,” Kate says.

Osgood flushes, breathing hard. “A kiss, then. I want that.”

Kate considers. “Lips or cheek?”

Cheek,” Osgood says quickly, her bravado evidently exhausted by her first foray.

“All right.” She moves forward.

But Osgood is already panicking, scrambling backwards. “No, no, I don’t—I’m sorry, ma’am, oh God, I’m so sorry, please don’t—”

“Osgood.” Her hands held out in surrender, her heart pounding her ears because she was trying to make a point, but what if she pushed it too far? “It’s all right. I promise. I’m not going to make you do anything.”

The relief is short-lived on Osgood’s face as she scuffs her foot along the floor. “You’re the one who should worry about me making you do things,” she mutters.

Kate sighs; she cannot help it. She tries to make it gentle instead of exasperated. “You would never hurt me.”

“You don’t know that,” Osgood insists.

Kate raises an eyebrow. “My children have been teenagers. I know acting out and empty threats when I see them.”

“I’m not—” Osgood visibly swallows back the words she was going to say; Kate can see her choosing the safer ones instead. “That’s different.”

“You would never hurt me,” Kate repeats. “You would never do anything to me if I told you not to. You are a good person, Osgood. Deep down, you know that. I know you do.”

“I’m not—” The mission is aborted again, the end of the sentence sucked back down into unspoken oblivion. “Missy, she—the me you remember. That’s not who I am anymore.” 

She stresses the words oddly, impressing a second meaning onto them beyond Kate’s grasp.

“You can still ask for things,” Kate says when it becomes clear that Osgood is not going to clarify.

“I would like…” the words get swallowed into a sob. “A hug.”

Kate moves slowly, so slowly; she feels as if she is walking through a museum in the dead of night, just barely avoiding the laser grid as she slips closer to the diamond. She barely believes that alarms will not go off when she touches Osgood’s shoulder, even after she touches Osgood’s shoulder—so warm, and firm, and alive—and nothing happens except that Osgood crumples towards her like paper soaked through with rain, and she wraps her arms lightly around her trembling body and tucks the younger woman’s head under her chin and feels her heart like an anvil under her ribs, ringing with each blow of Osgood’s shaky breaths. And oh, she hopes in a way that is very nearly prayer that she is not hurting Osgood, that she is not being selfish, that she is doing the right thing for someone else even though it feels like her own wish coming true.

“I want to believe this,” Osgood says into her shoulder. “I want to believe—you—this—so badly—but—”

Kate rubs slow, careful circles on her back, and Osgood crumples further, an origami crane left out in the melting snow, and Kate is so afraid that if she tries to pull her from the ice, she will rip and tear beyond recognition.

“She’ll never let me go,” Osgood says. Despite her words, her hands tighten, just for a second, around Kate’s back. “I tried. I tried…everything.” 

Kate hears entire hours of videotape in that single word. The escape attempts. The suicides. She has to stifle a moan before it escapes her own lips, a sound as though she is a dying animal with her leg caught in a trap. She holds Osgood a little tighter. Not as tightly as she wants. Only as tightly as she dares.

“We’ll keep trying,” she says. “You and I. Both of us. We’re both still here. I promise.”

#

Kate likes subtlety. It is the bane of her professional existence to be saddled with coworkers who like to charge in guns blazing, without taking the time to observe the situation and work out a careful plan of approach.

But when she arrives at the holding facility to find that Osgood has been under questioning by three different psychiatrists for over four hours, _after_ a three hour medical examination, it is a miracle she doesn’t rip the door off its hinges as she barrels into the office.

“What the hell do you think you are doing?” she snarls into the unlucky doctor’s face, her hand fisting in his pompous teal shirt collar.

Her hand is itching to hurl him across the room, and only the background noise of Osgood’s self-abasing protests is keeping her from following through.

The psychologist apparently has very little survival instinct, or maybe he realizes there is a definite limit to how far Kate will go before her concern for Osgood will pull her back, because he tries to protest: “We have a professional responsibility—establishing a psychological profile is key to securing our defenses against the Master, not to mention its potential for improving Dr. Osgood’s quality of life—”

“I checked the diary,” Kate says with icy fury. Her hands are shaking so badly she worries she may injure him without realizing it; she lets him drop to the floor with a thud. “She hasn’t eaten since last night. They took two pints of her blood this morning. Do you call that professionally responsible? Is this ‘do no harm?’ Don’t you people fucking talk to each other?”

A twinge of guilt in his eyes, but the prat would rather duck censure than admit he’d done anything wrong. “It’s the medical team’s charge to report anything that may influence our work—”

“How many times?” Kate can’t look at this man anymore; she turns to Osgood, who flinches back in her chair. That forces Kate to take a breath, to hold her hands up in surrender. “How many times have they kept you down here like this all day—”

“It’s not so bad,” Osgood says to the floor. “I’m used to it. It’s like a game that Missy used to play—”

It takes more strength than Kate ever knew she possessed to keep from punching a hole into the wall.

“Dr. Osgood has consented to the procedure,” the psychiatrist is saying, straightening himself up and dusting himself off, his confidence putting itself back together like a self-assembling puzzle. So sure he has done no wrong. “I have all the relevant paperwork right here, both for general purposes and for this specific session—”

“Of fucking course she consented,” Kate snaps. “She barely remembers how to do anything except consent, she’s mired in at least fourteen months of Stockholm Syndrome and survivor’s guilt, and she refuses to believe it’s not her fault she didn’t manage to escape sooner from a psychopath with over ten centuries worth of experience and advantage!”

She continues in this vein long enough that the psychiatrist finally beats a retreat, and as soon as the door closes behind him she feel exhaustion sink her like lead weights around her ankles, like a tidal wave far above her head. She lets herself fall into the chair next to Osgood, lets her head fall into her hands. What has she done? Frightened the one person she wants to protect, and alienated someone who might have been an ally in what she hopes to accomplish. What is she doing?

“Do you want me to withdraw my consent?” Osgood asks quietly.

Kate sighs, the wind escaping all the sails of her battleship. She never wanted this power over Osgood. This is too much power for any one person to have over another. She is terrified that one day she will exercise it for what she perceives as Osgood’s own advantage, and that she will then be never able to stop. “I want you to know what you want,” she says.

A long pause.

“I do,” Osgood says softly. “I want to help. I want to be useful. Even here.”

 _You’re back_ , Kate’s heart cries.

Out loud she says, “You still need food, and rest, and respect. You’re a human being, Osgood, not a tool.”

“Not so human anymore,” Osgood says softly.

What does she mean by that? The tech inside her? The way the Mistress has broken her down? Kate reaches out, lets her hand hang in the air like a promise. “Getting closer every day.”

Osgood swallows. “Will you…I want to keep helping. Will you come with me, sometimes? To tell me if I’m doing too much?”

Kate doesn’t have to think about her answer. “Of course.”

Osgood takes her hand and her fingers, for just a second, squeeze tight.

#

Further negotiations with Osgood result in just one session with one psychologist every other day; the odd days are used for therapy, which truth be told, Osgood would just as soon skip entirely, as opposed to the profile-building she is so eager to help with. But Kate made that one of her conditions. And she has made attending the Tuesday session her sacred obligation.

The room is always the same one: peeling blue paint on the walls exposing the gray underneath, revealing what an afterthought—and a neglected one at that—any consideration of comfort had been to the interior designers. The light is a baleful bone-yellow, still stubbornly incandescent despite the rest of the complex’s switch to fluorescent, and prone to sputtering blinks when left on longer than an hour. There is one framed print on the wall, drab and brown and vaguely Dutch in its severity of line. There are two plush chairs for the psychologist and the interview subject. They bring in a folding chair for Kate, and set to it the left of Osgood’s.

The experts come in and ask their questions, and they introduce themselves each time, but Kate can honestly not remember how many of them there are, or any detail of their faces. She thinks there have been seven, and that about half of them were female. She thinks they were all human.

She knows Osgood has been scared of all of them.

Osgood doesn’t look at Kate while she answers the experts’ questions, but she holds her hand so tightly that it aches for hours afterward. 

“Would you describe the Mistress’ disciplinary methods as calculated, or improvisational?”

“Both, depending on her goal.” Osgood swallows. “She always had one in mind, but she liked…forays…off the path.”

“Did you assist her in her goals?”

Kate pre-emptively squeezes Osgood’s hand, and Osgood starts slightly in her chair. “I…yes. Not at first. I mean, at first I pretended to go along with her to try to sabotage her. But later it got so I put off the sabotage and then—” her breath is starting to rasp in her throat, remembered panic—“she said—I—she said—she—”

“She punished you for those rebellions.” Not a question. After the videotapes, there is no possibility of it being a question.

A voice as quiet as a leaf settling on the grass. “Yes.”

“Was rape used as a punishment?”

“Sometimes.” Osgood’s voice goes quieter still. “Sometimes it was a reward.”

The questions go on and on, but Kate can barely hear them or Osgood’s responses. Everything has gone red and black in front of her eyes. There is a roaring in her ears and she is dizzy, she feels like she is swaying on the edge of an abyss except the abyss is all around her and she is going to fall no matter which way she leans—

And Kate realizes she cannot do this alone.

#

When you need an expert on matters of hypnosis and mind control, but with a survivor’s perspective, there is really only one person to call.

The first fifteen minutes of calling Sarah Jane Smith result in a hostile computer program rewriting London traffic law, a robot dog threatening in an incredibly snotty tone to use its laser nose on as many U.N.I.T. staff as it can get to, and impassioned speeches from not only the woman herself but from at least four photogenic teenagers. However, once Sarah Jane realizes that a) U.N.I.T. is not calling her to confiscate her alien toys, arrest her super-computer for crimes against humanity, or dissect her children and that b) the U.N.I.T. member calling her is her dear friend Alistair’s daughter Kate who she’d once spent such a pleasant evening and morning after with, then she stops yelling and becomes almost frighteningly eager to be helpful.

She nods along to Kate’s description of Osgood’s experience—edited, of course, for Osgood’s privacy and for the sake of the teenagers who are most certainly still listening in even though Sarah Jane has banished them from the attic.

When Kate finishes, her voice is hoarse. There is a stinging in her eyes that is very nearly tears, but she will not allow that.

Sarah Jane’s eyes are luminous with remembered pain, and empathy. “I’ll talk to her, of course,” she says, and she lays a hand on the edge of the screen as if she is laying it on Kate’s shoulder. Kate feels herself slump slightly in relief as if she could really feel that touch, as if that could be all it takes to hold her up. Sarah Jane is still so beautiful—even more beautiful, if that is possible, as if all the combined joy and pain in her life has transmuted to sunlight that radiates from those hazel eyes, that auburn-tinged brown hair, those sculpted cheekbones and soft lips. Those kind and steadfast hands. “Trust me, Kate—she’s still in there. She wants to come back to you. It will take time, of course.”

Kate gives a hollow laugh. It is not as hollow as it would have been yesterday; today the empty space in it orbits around a thread of stubborn hope. “Time we have in abundance.”

#

Kate enters a little slower than usual. She’d passed Sarah Jane on the way out, and though she’d die before she pressed the other woman for any details of what passed between her and Osgood—that was private, that was between them, she had no claim or right to that—she had felt a momentary surge of unease at the strain in the older woman’s smile, at the way the lines around her eyes, usually invisible in the glow of her still radiant beauty, had seemed to be carved deeper than usual. 

Her unease is heightened when she sees the way Osgood is sitting. Usually after a session with Sarah Jane, Osgood is beyond bubbly—honestly, Kate could kick herself for not having done the introductions sooner, seeing the way Osgood’s whole being comes alive with joy at the sight of her greatest hero—but today she is as closed off and guarded as a castle fortress.

Kate pretends not to see, or at least not to fully see. “Why the long face?”

Osgood shrugs. “No reason.”

She was always terrible at lying.

Kate raises an eyebrow. It is a challenge as calculated as a chess maneuver; she doesn’t want to push Osgood too far, but she refuses to let her stand still. “Usually I can’t get you to stop gushing after she comes by with a new Doctor story.”

“He’s not going to kill me, is he?” 

The words, and the sheer sadness that weighs down each syllable, close up Kate’s throat the second Osgood says them.

“He’s never coming to kill me,” Osgood says, and there’s a note of wondering betrayal in her voice as the sentence hangs forlorn in the otherwise silent air. “He’s never coming to—take care of things. I just have to—choose. Here, or…outside. Not knowing, never knowing, until it’s too late, if it’s too late, if there’s a right choice.”

 _You know what choice I think is right_ , Kate wants to say so badly that the words seem to vibrate on the edge of her lips, seeking release. Would it be bullying, really; coercion, truly? If it saved Osgood, if it set her free? Would such a small push, in the direction Osgood would choose if she could only see the light to guide the way, do such harm?

“He was never going to kill you,” she says finally, roughly. This is the admission she wanted from Osgood; why does it feel so wrong? Why does it hurt so much to see Osgood seeing the truth? “None of us ever were.”

“She never loved me,” Osgood says in a whisper. “She would hold me so close, and she would hurt me because she needed someone to forgive her, and I thought that meant—”

“No one would hurt you who loved you, Osgood—”

“But I loved her!”

It is a howl of anguish.

Osgood crumples in on herself, as if the heat of that admission has melted her. Any words left in her throat drip out in sobs and whimpers, and her heart runs in tears down her face.

The forcefield is down before Kate is aware of her finger on the button. She kneels in front of Osgood, her hands over hers like a reverse mirror. She presses Osgood’s hands down onto her knees as if her hands can speak the words her mouth cannot find.

“I miss her every day.” The confession makes it way past Osgood’s sobs. “I’m terrified she’ll come back and I can’t wait because she never left me alone so long and no one here tells me what to do and I don’t know what to do anymore if no one tells me what to do. I loved her so much, Kate—I loved her so much but she just let the Doctor take me like I was nothing and he didn’t even kill me and I don’t know what to do—”

“Keep going.” Kate’s voice is gravel over the bruised flesh of her throat. “All any of us can ever do, oh Osgood—”

“She was the closest I ever got,” Osgood says, and her nose is running now as she cries, her face red with humiliation as her voice thins to a thread. “To someone who loved me. What’s wrong with me that that’s the closest I got, that I miss someone who—”

“Nothing is wrong with you,” Kate says fiercely, and her nails dig into Osgood’s skin for a second before she remembers herself. “It was all her, dammit, nothing could ever be wrong with you, you are so good, Osgood, you are clever and sweet and so, so, so good—”

And Osgood falls into her, her arms encircling her, and it is such relief that is takes a full second before Kate realizes that Osgood’s lips are sucking at her neck, that her hands are fumbling with the buttons of Kate’s blouse—

Kate shoves her away. Her voice is steel. “ _No.”_

And Osgood, oh. Osgood’s face is shame and need twisted together. “Please, ma’am—I’m sorry, ma’am—”

And Kate Stewart, for the first time in her life, retreats.

“We’ll talk tomorrow,” she says, and leaves.

She makes the necessary arrangements for a heightened suicide watch, for additional therapy sessions, for a bacon sandwich with a note from her to be sent to Osgood at lunch tomorrow. 

And she knows this will not be enough.

This place is killing Osgood. She is a plant locked up in a dark cabinet, sickly yellow with lack of sun but overgrown with long and pleading tendrils searching for a handle to let in the light. She will search and search and search until her reserves are spent and gone, and then she will wither and die, all the while stubbornly refusing to leave the safety of a place where she cannot be seen.

Kate has to get her out of there.

#

It takes her a full week to set it up; she knows that her plan has to be airtight to make its way past Osgood’s inevitable objections. U.N.I.T. has several safe houses that might suit, but she waits until she has one that is perfect: an apartment building where all the flats have been bought up and extensive military renovations done. Osgood would have a floor to herself, both for privacy and containment should that prove necessary. The surrounding floors would be staffed with trained U.N.I.T. personnel, a line of defense both for and potentially—though she says this only to Osgood, though she has no intention of ever letting anything happen to Osgood—against.

“There are carbon-fiber bulkheads in every wall, floor, and ceiling,” she tells Osgood, her first visit back after the incident. It is tempting to look just past Osgood’s eyes; she looks into them instead, willing her to see what is best for her. “There are both scheduled and random sensor sweeps. Your individual flat, your floor, and the entire building can be locked down instantaneously if they detect anything wrong, if anyone flags anything odd in your behavior.”

Osgood is frowning, but in a contemplative way. “Anyone being…”

“U.N.I.T. personnel. They’ll be the ones living in the rest of the flats. Once you’re ready to leave the apartment, they’ll take turns shadowing you on your excursions.” It sounds so bleak. Kate lets a note of hope enter her voice. “As time goes on, of course…as you get more comfortable…we would ease back on the protective measures. Eventually you might even decide you didn’t need them at all.”

 _Might move out_ , she thinks but doesn’t say yet. _Might come back to life._

Osgood is shaking her head already. “How can we justify paying for this?”

“You’ve accumulated quite a bit of back pay,” Kate says dryly. “Plus, you’ll be doing online consulting for us on a freelance basis. I have some sway over the contract.”

Osgood almost smiles at the joke, but her eyes cloud over. She fusses with a thread on the hem of her jumper. Her voice is wistful.

“I could do that from here.”

Kate knew she would say something like this. It still sinks her like a stone.

“It’s nice here,” Osgood goes on, so softly. The thread on the hem of her jumper winding around and around her finger. “I’m safe here. Everyone is—safe here. I have my schedule with therapy and with profiling and with exams, and you bring me things and—it’s nice.”

Kate feels a quarry at the back of her throat, harsh rocks cutting at her heart. “And if I drop my trousers once a day for you to service me,” she says coldly, “it’ll be like the Mistress never left.”

Osgood flinches. Only slightly.

She has had so much longer than Kate to harden herself to horror.

“I’m good at it,” she said, voice still soft. Still looking down. The thread tighter and tighter around her finger. “Now. Since she—I’m good at it now.”

“Do you hear yourself?” Kate demands. Her composure has deserted her too quickly; she was not prepared for this, she never could have been prepared for any of this. “Damn it to hell, Osgood, do you hear what you are saying, do you hear the words—”

“Myself?” Osgood looks up then; her mask slips too. “I’m not myself. I’m not her—I can’t go back into her life, I can’t go back out there and—” She is shaking, more badly than she has in months; the words she has bottled up for months spill out of her: “I’m not Osgood anymore!”

Kate doesn’t understood. “You’ve been through a great deal, no one’s saying you haven’t, god, Osgood—”

“I’m not Osgood!” It’s an explosion bursting past her lips; she hammers her fist against the force field. “Bad copy—how is it you can’t see—” Sparks strike against the meat of her palm where it hits the solid air—“she’d just make a copy, over and over again—” her skin blistering—

“Stop it!” Kate orders.

And Osgood freezes.

Oh, the _relief_ in her face at being given an order. It is ice in Kate’s veins.

Her face falls, slowly, when no further orders follow.

“She killed Osgood on the plane,” the young girl says, the words momentarily robotic even as tears leak from her eyes. “And then she killed the copy. And then she killed another copy. Every time just another copy and every time worse, data loss and blurring and stopgaps with alien DNA and Cyberman tech. She reprogrammed everything little by little with every copy until she had me, and I did everything she told me to do…” Pain is winding its way back into her voice like a noose around her throat. “And I did so many things that she told me to do…” 

Memories flash across her face so vivid Kate would swear she can see them. 

The tears are a waterfall down her face now, her voice a choked sob. “You’d never come here if you knew everything I did when she told me to…”

It all slots into place in Kate’s brain, like a puzzle left out on the table for weeks with no solution in sight until suddenly two patches of color match, and the rest unfolds as it was always going to, inevitable. Something she never anticipated.

“Osgood—” she begins softly.

“I’m not her,” Osgood says. “She died. Why do you keep treating me like her when I’m not her and she died?”

“Osgood,” she says more firmly. It is non-negotiable. “I knew you were a clone.”

Her face, then, the confusion. “You knew I wasn’t your Osgood?”

So much she could say. That she was always her Osgood, that memories made her the same person, that the core truth of her could never been erased. That she was her Osgood then, now, and for however long she planned on being sweet and brilliant and determined to do good.

She raises her hand to the force field instead, lets it rest against the opposite side of the same spot where Osgood had struck until Osgood, too, raises her hand to mirror it.

“You are _Osgood_ ,” Kate says. Unwavering granite. “Not mine. Not hers. Just…Osgood.”

The younger woman swallows. Her voice is scraped thin. “And that’s…enough?”

“Always.”

#

The car pulls up to the flat. Osgood’s face is grey with apprehension, but her jaw clenches, determined. She casts a quick look at Kate, a wheeze catching in the back of her throat. “Could we…”

Her hand extended.

“Of course,” Kate says. “Inhaler.”

Osgood takes a puff, then takes Kate’s hand. Holds it as if it is the only anchor in the universe. “Thank you.”

They step from the car together.


End file.
